I went out a couple of nights ago and hit the bars with my
friends from work. I was having a great time and love going dancing with those
guys. We bar hopped around and ended up finishing the night at a bar in the
East Village called Urge. With as many Go-Go boys dancing on the bar, it’s
probably one of the most aptly named bars in the city right after the bar next
door who’s name is synonymous with a rooster. After many cocktails and two bars
behind us already, I was ready to hit the dance floor. While I just started to
get my “dance on,” a familiar face strode past me in the flashing light of the
strobe. As he walked by just to turn around and walk past me again, I noticed
it was the face of “Coffee Shop Joe.”
Coffee Shop Joe was a nickname he earned when I first
developed a crush him almost 2 years ago. Charming and handsome, he frequented
the coffee shop that I worked the closing shift for a few times a week. He
would come in on Thursday nights and stay in the corner doing his work on our
free wifi. We’d flirt and joke a lot but I always just assumed that he was
straight. Lacking any telltale signs of the gay, I assumed that he was just
another harmless crush that I have a habit of developing on straight boys. What
got the wheels in my head spinning was when one night as he was walking out the
door, he did an abrupt about-face and asked me what nights I worked. Puzzled as
to what this could mean, the next day I was walking down the 6th
avenue street fair and suddenly met the gaze of the crush 20 yards ahead of me
near the grilled corn stand. He smiled and walked over to me and we had a brief
chat. After he walked away, my friend whispered to me, “I hope you slept with
that guy,” to which I responded quite loudly and excitedly, “That was Coffee
Shop Joe!” since we had just been talking about him moments before our eyes met
on that busy street in spring. As a true best friend, he squealed too and
declared that he liked me too. It was “obvious.” Two days later, CSJoe was back
in the coffee shop for breakfast and wifi. I made him a free ice coffee
concoction that I’d been working on and summoned up the courage to drop off my
phone number to him as I left work that afternoon when my shift finished. I
didn’t make it to the next corner before he texted me and thus began our
friendly and witty texting banter. When we finally made plans for our first
date, I decided on the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens since neither of us had been
there before. I still wasn’t entirely sure if he was gay until halfway through
the botanical gardens he started telling me about how “coming out” had been for
him. Up until that point, I had this terrible fear that I was out on a date
with a straight guy who just thought we were hanging out as buds. After a few
drinks and dinner, I gave him a peck on the cheek, congratulating myself on a
great first date and looking forward to a second.
The second date came a week later and was definitely more
awkward. I could tell that something was wrong but he wasn’t saying anything
different. It was just a general sense that the vibes I was sending out were
being deflected off of a wall that he had put up. When I was dropping him at
the train station, he told me that he was just looking for a “friends” thing and
that he hoped I understood.
“Of course I understand. Yea, not a problem….Now, you should
hurry and get in there before you miss your train,” I suggested, hoping for him
to heed my advice as I felt a steel vice tighten around my sternum.
I’m not sure whether it was my deep v-necks or my impeccably
straightened side swept bang that turned him off, or whether he really was just
afraid of starting something new with somebody since he’d just gotten out of a
relationship.
Two months later and just days before I was to leave for a
contract I’d accepted in Hawaii for a few months, I got a text from him asking if
I was going to be at the Coffee shop that day. I was there, doing my final inventory before I left in a few days. I
didn’t want to see him. I had just begun to move on after nearly a month and a
half of moping and ignoring my gym membership. Dashing about the shop, moments
from counting my last wine bottle and escaping before I’d have to see him,
CSJoe walked in the front door and smiled at me. Giving him a standard “hello”
in front of his friends was apparently not enough as he cornered me in the
stairwell alone to talk to me about what was going on to find out more about my
trip to Hawaii. He wanted to keep in touch and told me to hit him up when I
returned in two months. In hindsight I can’t help but wonder if he was just
being nice and trying to be my friend or whether he was finally ready to date
and was re-exploring me as an option. Of course I would like to believe that I
was being re-explored since we’ve never kept in touch as friends since. Also, I
think when a person is ready to be in a relationship, they aren’t looking for
the right person, they are just looking for a person who’s ready as they are. Just
weeks later, according to my Facebook stalker research, he found the guy that
he’s currently been seeing for the last year and a half. I have had essentially
no contact with him since Hawaii.
So here I am, faced with a guy who in a hazy strobe lit room
can still have this overwhelming control over me. I tapped his shoulder as he fished his way through the crowd
and asked how he was doing. Without stopping, he simply craned his head to look
at me and with a half smile, nod. My friends left to go to the restroom and get
some more drinks. Left on the dance floor, quite inebriated, I did what most
gays would do and requested a Robyn song for me to dance to and take my mind
off of things. With my friends nowhere in sight after 15 minutes, my song came
on. It wasn’t the Robyn song that I was anticipating. Instead I began to dance
to her hit song “Dancing on my own.” For anyone not familiar with the song,
these are the lyrics to the chorus:
“I’m in the corner
Watching you kiss her,
I’m right over here,
Why can’t you see me?
I’m giving it my all, but I’m not the girl you’re taking
home.
I’ll keep dancing on my own.”
Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the haze and the
flashing lights. Or maybe it was the strategically placed old crush standing 20
feet away from me affectionately holding and kissing his boyfriend that he
started seeing right after me, but I began to believe that I was LIVING the
song and thus began to dance like I haven’t danced in a long time. As the
lights dimmed and the song slowed, I stood dramatically and sang along with the
final verse as she sang:
“So far away, but still so near.
The lights go on. The music dies.
But you don’t see me standing here. I just came to say
goodbye.”
Then a dramatic drum roll seized my legs and I started doing
the flashdance jog in place as the couple walked out of the bar wrapped tightly
in each other’s arms. The final chorus of my dance break made me realize that I
needed to say goodbye. I wasn’t still hanging on to a desire for him. I was
hanging onto the desire to have what he had. But he didn’t make me laugh. He
didn’t make me feel important. He didn’t need me. Maybe I should be thankful
that I’m dancing on my own and not trying to be something that I’m not with a
guy like him.
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